Category Archives: Terekke

A Song for Seria

Thinking spaceships are a common trope in hard-science fiction. Sometimes they are fully artificial like the Minds of the Culture. Others, they are enhanced humans as in M John Harrison’s Light, or China Mieville’s Embassytown. Although these ships interact with the humans inside and around them, we get the sense that these humans and ourselves can only but glimpse the profound richness of their experience. They are after all able to deploy quantum computing resources and whatever comes next to accelerate their mental processes, record them and gaze at them from the outside at different speeds or freeze them to contemplate the mechanics of their own consciousness like Matrix bullet time in hundreds of dimensions; they can absorb reality with all our senses and more. Solar winds caress their metal faces; the death of a star arrives like the final letter from a long-lost lover; slow shifts in the drone of the cosmos come and go like the selection of a religious radio station as the drive through the night eternal. They must have a mood analogous to our states of contemplation. We try to imagine them out there, exploring all these perceived moments unfolding in parallel inside their own minds, looking for meaning in the complexity of an infinite recursion. As we do so, Terekke’s l8r h8r plays in the background, like a projection of terabytes of majestic vibes in a deep perceptual space we are just about able to parse.